Days after Punjab Education Minister Pargat Singh dared his Delhi counterpart Manish Sisodia to reveal the condition of all the government schools in the national capital, the Aam Aadmi Party leader made a surprise visit to two schools in the border state and dubbed their condition as "pathetic".
Reacting to Singh's challenge, on November 29, to provide a list of 250 Delhi government schools — along with various key parameters for their comparison with schools in Punjab on the Performance Grading Index scale — Sisodia visited two schools in Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi's assembly constituency, Chamkaur Sahib.
The toilets in the schools are stinking and the classrooms are infested with spider webs and broken furniture, Sisodia claimed. "I am in Punjab chief minister's constituency and in his village," Sisodia told reporters, adding that one of the schools he visited has only one teacher teaching Nursery to Class V on a petty salary of Rs 6,000 per month.
"This is the condition of a school in Channi's constituency. If we call it a number one school, it is a joke for children," Sisodia said. Sisodia said that if AAP is voted to power in Punjab, it will make the schools in the state "as good as they are in Delhi".
Where it all began
The reveal-it-all spat on school education between the two states had begun last week, precisely on November 25, after Sisodia proposed joint visits to ten schools each in Delhi and Punjab for comparison. Reacting to Sisodia's proposal, Punjab Education Minister Pargat Singh had questioned the need for a comparison of only ten schools and sought a list of 250 Delhi government schools for their comparison. When Sisodia released a list of 250 Delhi schools with their locations, Singh had pointed out, on November 29, that he had demanded not only the locations but various other key parameters such as the numbers of students and teachers in them and their pass percentages.
